To be even remotely safe from this, you need to use a kernel driver, which is invasive and widely seen as unacceptable - at the moment anyhow.
See Riot and Valorant from earlier this year. There was a lot of outcry and the response from the devs was basically "we don't give a damn".
Other games, for example, scan window titles or signature for a variety of debuggers/hacking tools like IDA and x64dbg. There's many techniques and variations you can apply to make things like this more "annoying" - but never impossible.
Earlier this year, there was a PCI card PoC that would read memory and act as an "undetectable" wallhack - people are clearly crafty enough to always find their way around.
Is there a way to check what games/platforms install kernel drivers? I recently installed trackmania and after jumping through what felt like 10 hoops just to play the game (log in to epic, download epic games store, log into ubisoft, etc etc), I realized I have idea how much stuff is being installed on my pc after all these steps.
Most recent games install their anticheats from their own folder, so if you open something like Process Explorer and look at the loaded drivers list, you could tell by the path.
However, AFAIK nearly all games with anti-cheat (save for Valorant of course) load their anti-cheat when the game starts and unload it when the game closes. You can run something like Process Explorer/Monitor before running the game, then notice what drivers & services it's loading.
There was backlash about Riot's Vanguard but I feel it was mostly driven by the gaming media as the vast majority of consumers don't understand the nuance of userspace vs kernelspace.
I'd expect more developers begin to deploy kernel-level anticheat in the future.
I don't think you can attribute this universally to "gamers" - there's a lot of games that don't have obvious hacking problems by employing various other measures which aren't as invasive.
I'd call myself a "gamer" and would never install something like Valorant - and most of my friends didn't either. Some of us value our privacy more than getting rid of the one hacker we get per week.
See Riot and Valorant from earlier this year. There was a lot of outcry and the response from the devs was basically "we don't give a damn".
Other games, for example, scan window titles or signature for a variety of debuggers/hacking tools like IDA and x64dbg. There's many techniques and variations you can apply to make things like this more "annoying" - but never impossible.
Earlier this year, there was a PCI card PoC that would read memory and act as an "undetectable" wallhack - people are clearly crafty enough to always find their way around.